Posts Tagged ‘birthday’

I love October. I really do. It might be partly because I was born in October. Yes, I do believe our birth month influences our favourite season, but not because of our birth as such. Rather, I think we grow up looking forward to our birthday as kids, and as a consequence our birth month is subliminally programmed into our minds as a season to look forward to.

Mind you, October has its objective charms:

My dahlias are still going strong; I expected them to keep going until the first frost but never the less I’m still a little bit impressed that this flower bed is just becoming better and better. Sure, some of the flowers, like the ones below, are less than spectacular in their own right – I really dislike the rather faded salmon colour of these flowers, but they have a pretty shape and as the picture shows they are great for bees and other insects at a time when loads of other flowers have gone.

I’m feeling rather down these days, though, in spite of my love of autumn. It’s hard, being unemployed and sending out application after application and getting – as a best result – rejections. It seems a lot of companies no longer send out rejections unless they have an automated system to do it for them, and this is quite understandable, considering that some of the jobs I’ve applied for have had 5-600 applicants for a single job.

Of course it doesn’t help that The Flâneur Husband is off on a 2-week business trip. I miss him, of course, but just as importantly he gives me a weekly rhythm which is just going haywire when he’s away and I don’t have a job. What’s week, what’s weekend? It all blurs and becomes a gray sort of non-time.

I’d probably be quite content to be a stay-at-home husband if the circumstances were right for it, but they aren’t. First of all we can’t afford it – and money is obviously a major determining factor in deciding your life style – and secondly I’m just not sure I would have enough to DO to occupy me, were I to be a full-time stay-at-home spouse. We live in an apartment, and the garden is by our holiday home, so there’s no way it could provide me with full-time entertainment.

Still, it can give me highlights like this one:

So… I still need a job. Not just for the money, but for something to do with my time.

I’ve been rather down-hearted lately, though not in a “depressed” sense – I’ve previously been diagnosed with depression and I have the deepest respect for that term, and this is NOT depression. It’s just a rough patch. I want to stress that difference because the term “depression” is so often abused to describe “feeling down” or “the blues”.

It does mean I’ve been unable to do some of the things I wanted to do. I didn’t get the big foodie-post written up for Claire‘s guest-blogging post, and there have been many other things I haven’t gotten around to doing, even though I had promised myself to do it.

People do understand, though, that this is a rough time to go through, and my biggest problem is to tell people what is happening, including my husband. Somehow it’s easier to share this with a somehow anonymous public, rather than telling it to friends and family.

At the same time, remember – as I do – how privileged I am. There are so many other people out there where unemployment means the risk of not being able to feed their children, getting proper medical care or other serious implications. If this entry makes you feel compassionate and makes you want to help others, find a charity that helps people in developing countries. I can help myself, but others don’t have that luxury.